Transcribed
with diagrams, tables and arbitrary headings by J. Bailey.

Square
brackets [ ] contain editors comments.

Have
we got a subject for tonight?

[Question from the audience] I was rather interested, Eugene, in
this program that I didn’t see …. [laughter] ….
That said that the amount of tension/stimulation that a baby gets in
its very early months can condition the whole reaction to life. So
our ……??? must be put into us very early. Which gives
us a difficult problem that we are going to struggle with later.

Yes,
well of course it begins considerably earlier than birth. In fact it
begins with a gentleman called Adam.

Let’s
draw a circle here to represent the original human protoplasm from
which we all derive.

Now
it is a fact, not a theory, that all multiplication of biological
elements is by division. The cell divides in order to multiply. Now
this same thing that you can observe under the microscope in a
monocelled animal occurs in the multiplication of human beings; only,
the mode of doing it is rather less obvious. You get under the
microscope a monocell (1) and watch it long enough, you will actually
see the thing goes through a process of division. It has inside it a
little nuclear spot, the intelligence. This is observed to behave in
a peculiar way and then to divide itself into two centres (2) and
then various processes take place between the two centres and it
builds a wall up. And then it pinches where the wall is (3) and
gradually brings itself into a state where it can sever itself into
two beings(4).

And
that’s the basic method of multiplication by division. [02:12]

The
implications of this in religion and philosophy are tremendous,
because it means that none of us actually start life with the blank
tablet that some thinkers assume. The tabula rasa, the blank
tablet of certain philosophical schools is just a pure abstraction
... it just never did exist.

Now,
what happens with a human being: every human being derives from an
egg, and at a certain stage a portion of this egg is set off for
reproducing in the next generation. If we like to say in this
diagram, schematically, we’ll just cut it in half, and say that
one half is for next generation. We write ‘N.G.’,
or ‘no good’. The next generation, those are the sex
cells, and on this side the somatic cells which are going to develop
into the body. Of course, it’s more complicated than this,
because the sex cells are really inside the somatic cells.

Some
of the cells are going to become body, and some of the cells are not
going to become body until they have been extruded, joined to another
cell from a person of the opposite sex, and projected into the
future. But the sex cells and the somatic cells are created by
dividing the original cells.

Irritability of Protoplasm

So
we come to a very peculiar fact which is ignored because it’s
too simple. The whole human protoplasm, here represented by one
circle has divided itself, and through progressive divisions has
multiplied itself. In each generation it multiplies more and more. We
have about twenty thousand million such results in the world today at
the human level. Now all these millions of people are derived from
the original human protoplasm, called in certain mystical schools the
Adamic Plasm. And this plasm has certain qualities. The basic quality
of all this protoplasm is the quality of irritability. Irritability
does not mean that your grandmother gets annoyed with you, in the
field of biology. It means that when a stimulus comes, the substance
of this being moves in response to the stimulus. The stimulus energy
goes in and modifies the protoplasm receiving it, and that protoplasm
reacts back onto the stimulus source. There is action from the
stimulus and a reaction from the protoplasm, and this we call the
irritability of the protoplasm.

Memory

A
single cell has this cellular irritability, meaning this power to
receive incoming energy and to react to it. But it not only does
this, it not only reacts to it, but retains a trace of the original
stimulus and its own reaction. This means that once a stimulus has
been put in, as a certain amount of energy which initiates a movement
in the protoplasm, that movement continues in that protoplasm
throughout the whole period of the existence of it. This is the
ground of our memory. It is also the ground of the engram patterns
which constitute various mental disorders later. We can see here that
because this protoplasm has this power to retain the patterns of all
motions that it’s ever experienced, that the result is that
every new stimulus comes into an existing pattern.

Now,
there never has been a time when a cell existed with no pattern in
it. For a cell to exist — a living cell — there must be a
nuclear intelligence which is already characterised. And furthermore
the surrounding substance around the nucleus, itself responds —
has this irritability capacity — responds to the stimulus and
retains the motion characteristic of the stimulus. [07:10]

Generation of Protoplasm

Now
imagine an egg here, and this egg has been subjected to various
experiences. The experiences are all engrammed inside, and the
reactions to those stimuli are also engrammed, so that the totality
of all the experiences of that protoplasm continues.

Now,
if we now divide this egg — or the egg divides itself, by
splitting its nucleus — we get two eggs. Because these two eggs
are the identical protoplasm of the original, they also have traces
of the experience they had before the division. Now this is the
ground of what we call ancestral experience. This is the basis of the
falling dream and such-like phenomena. It’s the ground of Carl
Jung’s collective unconscious, and so on.

Every
egg now existing contains within itself residual traces of the
experience that that same protoplasm had before the cell divided. So
if we go on, starting from any modern man, pushing back through his
parents, we are pushing back all the time into this original
protoplasm. And the important thing to realise is that the protoplasm
of our body — the one we have now — is not new. If we are
twenty-one, it is not just twenty-one years old. It’s exactly
as old as the human race. There is no human protoplasm that is not as
old as the human race. Consequently nobody comes into this world
unconditioned. [08:59]

Mnemic Patterns

In
recent experiments of the kind just mentioned, it is shown that the
protoplasm of children at a very, very early stage from birth respond
to stimuli and retains the impressions and that subsequent in-going
stimuli are conditioned by those already received. This is the basis
of the conditioning process. Less popularly understood is the fact
this the same egg, which is developed into a child, was already
sensitive before it had altered its form from the egg into the
embryo. All protoplasm is human protoplasm — is the original
protoplasm — is not something different from the original
derived from it. It is the original protoplasm, continued by division
through successive generations. And consequently if we start with any
given egg, we can go back to the two ancestors of this egg,
continuously multiplying on the way back. And this way we would get
more ancestors than we have descendants, were it not for the fact
that at a certain point we discover that inter-marriages occurred
back. And the triangle begins to narrow and we come back to the one
protoplasm from which all human beings started. [10:26]

Now,
if we like to think of the generations of protoplasm as simply the
layer experiences of one human protoplasm, we can see that in each
generation there is a layer of experience. And this has to do with
the intensity and duration of the original stimulus. Imagine for a
moment we have an egg here and we subject this egg to a mild electric
shock ... a mild one that just makes it feel slightly unpleasant. And
we put it on only for a tenth of a second. There’s a little
ripple through it. It starts to contract, but the stimulus switches
off and it quickly returns to its normal position. But inside it
there is now a motion, a shadow motion going through it from this
little electric shock. Now, that motion can never cease as long as
that protoplasm exists. And it would condition our behaviour all the
time if it were not for the overlaying of this mild stimulus by
others ... less mild.

Supposing
the next one is very violent. Now we get a very strong reaction. And
this one, when we look at the drawing, if we don’t know that we
already have a shadow ripple in it, which we actually saw being drawn
here, a quick look at that and we might think, oh, these are the
only marks there are in this cell, and the paper looks a bit dirty
elsewhere. Now these very strong waves — these very strong
alternate contractions and expansions of the protoplasm —
overlay in stimulus value the other stimulus below. But if we take
away this strong stimulus after a minute, then these strong ones
begin to subside again. And they can fall down to the level —
providing we don’t re-stimulate them — they can fall down
to the level of intensity nearly like the other ones.

This
is what happens during dreams, when your external strong stimulus,
the material environment is reduced. You cut down the light stimulus.
You go into a darkened room. You make your body comfortable. You
relax it. You try to cut down all the stimuli from outside, and this
causes a general lapsing, down to a threshold level, of all the
records of all the stimuli you’ve had. Now if, when you are in
that state of total, nearly equal stimulation — not quite
equal, that’s impossible: nearly equal — if then a horn
blows in the distance and the sound comes from the window, that horn
sound stimulates some already existing patterns within, and lifts
those up into consciousness, and this re-ecphorised mnemic pattern is
a dream. [13:57]

Now,
if we imagine that all the experiences are nearly down to the same
level, then the thing that determines what we will dream is the
character of the stimulus hitting the whole complex. Now in the same
way, when we come to examine our own experiences and our parents’,
our immediate parents’, if we can cut down on the immediate
stimulation in our own body, we can begin to become aware of our
father’s and mother’s experiences. This is not merely a
matter of theory, it’s a matter of daily, experimental fact:
that when we push a person back into early childhood and then into
the early pre-natal zone, we can by a series of verbal stimuli
reactivate certain early phases and from these trigger back, until
finally the person is reading the record of his own mother and
father. He can recapture verbal phrases. He can see the scenes they
saw, see the clothes they wore, and so on. Because the protoplasm we
are examining is the protoplasm which was the parent body.
[15:11]

Infinite Intelligence

To
understand this properly is to understand the real meaning of
reincarnation as opposed to some rather naïve ideas of
reincarnation. The resident nuclear intelligence there is simply the
intelligence of the infinite vibrating on this highly sensitive
nuclear centre, and through that, conditioning the surrounding plasm.
But that intelligence is the Infinite Absolute Intelligence that
created the universe. And yet that same intelligence appears in the
worm and in the donkey and in man, and differs in them not on account
of itself as intelligence ... but on account of the peculiar pattern
of their bodies. Their bodies respond differently because they have
different levels of organisation. There is no evolution whatever of
consciousness. Evolution is of form. A sensitive organism responds to
intelligence better than an insensitive one. The congenital idiot is
just as intelligent behind his deficient body as a genius is with his
efficient body. We must never think that one being is more
intelligent than another, but only that the vehicles of these beings
differ so much that they filter this intelligence in different ways
in different degrees.

Now,
here we have a human egg and it is going to develop. At each stage in
its development, the nuclear intelligence — which is really the
intelligence of the Absolute — is working through to organise
this protoplasm. It’s going to make a human body. In each stage
it has self-awareness. When it’s in the stage of an egg, it
feels like an egg, and the content of consciousness in that zone is
egg-shaped. Prior to the process of mitosis where it divides itself,
it is entirely a rudimentary, protopathic awareness. It feels like a
sphere and this sphere is a sensitive sphere. It is not yet analysed.
It is a pre-analytic whole — it is not a synthetic whole, which
implies analysis — it is a pre-analytic whole. Every human
being has been an egg, has been in the protopathic state prior to
cell division, and because of this irritability of the protoplasm it
retains within itself this pre-analytic, whole consciousness. And
this pre-analytic whole consciousness is the ground of its belief,
which later is going to help it back to wholeness when it’s
lost it.

Internal Self-contradiction

Now,
the nuclear intelligence under the influence of Absolute Intelligence
here divides and puts a wall up. As soon as that wall is put up, the
content of consciousness — not the consciousness — the
content is changed. It now has the whole awareness still engrammed on
it — still it is aware of a wholeness — but it now has an
awareness: there is a wall inside it. And it has an awareness of the
stages of separation of the nucleus, and it has an awareness that
this part is giving orders, and this part is giving orders [each of
the nuclei]. But the orders on each side are shielded by the wall. So
we immediately have a possibility of a conflict within a being. Quite
apart from any external thing, the being can fight itself. Wherever
there is a cell with a nucleus, and that nuclear intelligence can
give orders, there is the possibility that the orders of those cells
will not coincide. So we can say immediately that on the appearance
of the first division within the egg we have the possibility of
internal conflict, of self-contradiction [cell-f contradiction].
[19:42]

Now,
in the bible this wall building is called Simeon and Levi1.
It says, Simeon and Levi digged a wall to their own hurt. They
slew a man. The man they slew is this egg. They slew him, they
killed him, they deaded him, or divided him, by putting a wall
inside. This breaks the original, non-synthetic, pre-analytic unity,
and sets up inside it the possibility of ignorance.

This
nucleus centre does not know with the same intensity that it knows
itself, what the other side is doing. All conflict in the human race
derives from this fact ... internal self-contradiction.

When
the bible — it says they digged a wall — the
reason is that when you take a bit of earth and you put your spade in
here and throw it up, then you get a ditch and a wall, something like
a sine wave. They digged a wall. Now, this wave is actually
the kind of process that sets up this wall inside. There is a
depression and an elevation corresponding with each other. In the
same way, every resistance in the body is a dynamic resistance. There
are no materials in the universe other than force behaviours. Matter
is a function of force.

When
the plasm contracts, it makes a zone difficult to penetrate, and when
it expands it makes a zone easy to penetrate. And it does this
alternately and very, very rapidly, and it does this throughout the
continuance of the protoplasm and thus it keeps the walls in being
dynamically. All these walls are simply functions of force vibrating
very strongly. And you know that when you spin a bicycle wheel, if
you try to put your finger through it, your finger will get hurt. And
the faster you spin the wheel, the easier to get hurt. And if you
stop the wheel you can put your finger between the spokes very, very
easily. So you see there’s a relation between solidity of
matter and velocity.

And
the same thing is true in the atom, where we have an attendant
electron going round an atom, and the electron takes a certain length
of time to complete its orbit. If we want to hit the nucleus of that
atom, we must fire a particle at it so fast that it can traverse the
orbit of the electron before the electron has time to get round and
hit it away. So that even within the realm of the atom, solidity is a
function of velocity.

The
faster a thing moves, the harder it is to penetrate it. You know that
if you take a candle and put it in a gun, and fire it at high speed,
although it’s only a wax candle it will go through a wooden
door. This velocity confers upon it a quality that it didn’t
have before. Somehow, solidity is velocity.

Painful Stimuli

Now
this wall inside our being, created, is simply a very, very rapid
zone vibration ... a vibration confined to a certain area such that
when motions from nuclear centres are transmitted and they hit
against this vibrating wall they are reflected back to their centres.
This means that each cell in the body is a little individual. Each
cell is a little individual. It feels its own sensations, as well as
transmitting to other cells that information. When you burn your
finger and you feel oh, I have burnt my finger, not only do
you feel it but the cells that are burnt have felt it
too. They send you the message. You get the message in the brain
cells, and they have already had the immediate
sensation of burning. Each individual cell itself responds to
pleasure pain as well as sending a message to the control centres in
the brain. And because of this individual capacity of the cells,
cells with painful experiences upon them can refuse to let you know
what is going on ... cells
can bypass information.

Now, let’s
draw again ... Simeon and Levi put a wall inside. And that would cut
the being into two beings from the point of view of messages, if were
not for the fact that we grow over this wall a little nerve. That
nerve allows the passage across these resistant walls of information
from one centre to another. In the bible, this is called Joseph.
Joseph throws his vine over the wall. Simeon and Levi digged a wall
and killed the whole man, that is, cut him in two — or into
thousands when mitosis is completed — and Joseph throws his
vine over the wall. The nerves grow across the dividing walls.
[25:34]

So
we have here a peculiar double advantage. If we take a cell and
divide it [1], when a stimulus comes to one side, the energy of the
stimulus is confined for practical purposes to the side that receives
it. The other side is free. The wall vibrates a little and there’s
a faint shadow in here of that, but not enough to determine the cell
response. So if this is a painful stimulus, this half wants to move
away from it, but the other half doesn’t. Now this is the
ground of the possibility of free choice. If we then put another wall
across it, which happens in the egg [2], and if a painful stimulus
comes here, it is confined to only a quarter of the cell, then
three-quarters of it are free. And if we go on dividing the cell in
this manner until we’ve got a few million of them, and if we
put a stimulus at one point it is confined to that zone by the
surrounding walls, and that means the rest of the being is free. So
that when you put your finger on a hot bar and feel it burn, the rest
of your body doesn’t have to go away.

In
the early phases before cell division, the whole body reacts, so that
if it is painful it all wants to go away. But if it does, it will
never learn anything, and never be characterised. So this putting up
of the walls which initially destroys the unity has function. It
enables us to locate, to localise, to confine the energy of a painful
stimulus — or of a pleasurable one — into such a small
locality that the rest of our being is free. And this gives us the
power to motivate the rest of our being and push towards the pain.
This is tremendously important. It’s the ground of all
religious teaching — the power to move towards a pain. Because
if we haven’t got that power, we are always conditioned by the
pleasure/pain situation. But many things lie hidden behind walls of
pain. [28:04]

Supposing
there is a wall and inside that wall there’s a treasure. And
this wall is painful. Symbolically it is the fiery sword turning at
the gate of Eden. Inside there is Eden ... this is the centre of your
intelligence. You start to introvert. You go inside and you come
against a band of pain. You are turned away from it, and you go back
into the external world ... you become extroverted and therefore
dependent upon the external stimulus situation. But if you have
enough of yourself free, and you can localise the pain, with your
free part you can drive through that pain band and get into the
Garden of Eden again.

Now,
pain has a function. It’s to keep people away from things until
they can drive themselves into things. Christ being deliberately
crucified is saying, I’ll show you how to do the most
painful thing in the world positively and deliberately and thereby
conquer everything ... basically, conquering death, because death
means division. If we are to gain unity we must break down the
divisions of our being. But every division is a pain. That is, every
division is a resistance which when we try to overcome it will be
experienced as a pain. But if we don’t penetrate this pain, we
cannot gain our unity, and we cannot gain — if we don’t
gain our unity — our optimum level and our supreme striking
force in life. [29:52]

In Utero Development

Now,
let’s return to the babe a moment. Each baby has begun as an
egg and has gone through various phases. It’s developed itself
and got a little head and legs and so on. Each phase of its being is
recorded inside it. This means that by the appropriate techniques —
it can be done by hypnosis but can be done more efficiently by
another method — a person can be returned to any phase of their
existence. So that he can re-experience what it was like to be born,
what it was like to be six months in conception, three months, what
it was like to suffer an abortion attempt that failed, what it was
like to be something like a fish, what it was like to be a little
egg, and so on. All these are recoverable ... but that isn’t
the beginning of it. When we go back to conception point, if instead
of coming forward we push back through conception point, and just
keep pushing the time factor backwards, suddenly we become aware of
mental contents that as an individual we had not had previously had
at all. And we begin to see environments, figures, costumes and so
on, of periods not contemporary. When we do this we will find that
first of all we are discovering impressions from mother and father,
and mother and father’s mother and father, and so on. But there
is no limit to this retrogression backwards, because the protoplasm
we are dealing with is the original protoplasm of the human kind,
which has simply multiplied by dividing. So we are not trying to get
to know about other beings. We are getting to know about our own
being. So that we can push back in principle right to Adam ... to the
first human protoplasm.

Going Back to God

Rather
funnily, a fortnight ago, I was sent a patient who was rather
difficult and rather upset the psychiatrist — who was a
Freudian — because this psychiatrist was expecting to find a
birth trauma and instead of this, this particular fellow jumped back
to conception and began to describe these processes. And this
particular Freudian psychiatrist was not used to it and became very,
very alarmed and told him to stop it. But he couldn’t do it.
And he started to regress and he began to describe other periods. And
then he came to the point where he insisted he was Adam. But he
wasn’t content with being Adam. He went back to be God. And at
this point the psychiatrist stopped him, became very alarmed and sent
him to another psychiatrist. He had reached God.

Now
he was absolutely convinced that he’d reached God ... not as an
insane being, but simply that the nuclear intelligence at each
generation level is the same nuclear intelligence right back to the
first human protoplasm, and that first human protoplasm is simply
organised by the infinite intelligence called God. Now he wasn’t
allowed to go back to God again, and he was very upset about this
because he felt very good when he was God. But according to the
theory, he hadn’t gone back to God, he had to be stopped. And
he was told by two other psychiatrists that he had gone too far and
he mustn’t do it again.

Now,
I didn’t mind him going back to God at all. So I recommended
him to go back again and he went, and after a time he got bored ...
[laughter]

This
is metaphysically accurate. If you remember the great Indian
philosophers, how they thought about God. If we represent God by the
white paper, if we don’t draw on the white paper, it’s
equivalent to God not creating. If he doesn’t create at all, he
has nothing to look at. He has no object, no Only Begotten Son, no
universe, nothing whatever to play with. And consequently, he is
bored. In the Indian myth, it says, God was alone. Suddenly he
realised he was alone and he got fed up. And then he became afraid of
remaining alone, so he fashioned for himself an object. And this
object of course, as God is a man, had to be a woman ... because man
means evaluator, you see. So he made a woman. And he then got hold of
this woman and started to procreate. And she said he mustn’t
do that, because I am only you, and ran away. And he then pursued
her, and she changed herself into a tigress. So of course he had to
change into a tiger to catch her. And she then ran away again and
changed into a deer and he changed into a stag and he caught her
again. And from this all the forms of the universe in this lovely
myth are derived. [35:26] ***

And
this myth is basically true. The Absolute intelligence has produced a
supreme object for itself and without that object it has literally
nothing whatever to play with. In the Indian system, the universe,
the one turn, uni verse is a great big ball for God to play
with. And this playing about with this ball is called Li-La. Li-la
means sport. Something like lie-low to me. And this
sport is that whereby the Absolute Intelligence can apply its
infinite power and get a reaction from its own power and thus be
reflexively aware of its own being. In Christian terminology, this
big sphere is called the Only Begotten Son: The Logos Sphere.

The
Gnostics would call this, as to its formal content, the Sophic sphere
... Sophia; the Wisdom sphere. Logos means ratio. It’s easy to
see the relation between Sophia and Logos, because Sophia is the
sphere of all forms and Logos is the ratio of those forms.

The Universal Soul

So
here is a great big object. Now this great big object is the
universal soul. This is the anima mundi of the scholars and
because this — we represent by the paper — is sentient
power, as power it is cause and as sentience it is aware of what it
is doing, then this great big sphere, this original macrocosmic
sphere, is Sentient Power turned into an objective unity. And the
name for this objective unity of Sentient Power is soul. Any
objective unity of sentient power is called soul. And this big
one is the macrocosmic soul. In the mystical Hebrew concept, it is
also the Adam Kadmon ... the big universal man.

Man
does not mean a being with a couple of arms and legs sticking out of
his sides. It simply means an evaluating intelligence ... whether you
have legs or not. You may remember that Grenfell of Labrador on one
occasion said that a friend of his in India had got in a railway
accident and lost both his legs and arms. And as soon as he lost them
all his relations came from miles around and started taking the
furniture away. And he sent a message to a lawyer and the lawyer came
and talked to him and he insisted that he was still he,
although he had lost his legs and arms. And so they went to court,
and in the court he was able to establish that even without legs and
arms he was he, and all his beloved relations had to return the
furniture.

So
you see, the essential thing about being a man is that he is an
intelligence with the power to evaluate. The word man simply
means the substance [m] energised [a] moving
[n], and this is the basis of a word meaning to measure ...
mensuration, from a root ma to measure, which you see in
mathe-ma-ta ... mathematics. So a man is an intelligence that
evaluates. That being so, the macrocosmic being, because it is
sentient power — because there is nothing else for it to be —
is itself a man. It is the macrocosmic man.

This
macrocosmic man in different religions is called a different name.

In
Christianity it is called the Logos, the Cosmic Christ.

For
the Gnostics it’s this Sophic sphere. It is a fullness, a
pleroma, a great fullness of forms.

In
Buddhism it is the Dharma Kaya, the body of law of the Buddha ...
that the Buddha is not an individual on Earth, but the Buddha is this
cosmic self. And any individual within the Cosmos who can bring
himself into the same vibrational level as the Macrocosmos, is
thereby a Buddha. Therefore in the Buddhist scriptures you will find
statements, otherwise quite puzzling, which say, I am breaking up
the idols of the Buddha because there is no
Buddha. And if there is a Buddha then all the Buddhas are the same
Buddha. And the man who thinks there is a Buddha to worship other
than himself is deceived. Because if the man is going to worship the
macrocosmic Buddha, the act of worshipping it objectively separates
the worshipper from it and he doesn’t become a Buddha.
Therefore boddhi-dharma who was a very tough Buddhist said there
aren’t any Buddhas. He said, don’t worship it. Break
it to bits. If you see one, smash it. Because the moment you
start to worship it, you have objectified it and in the act of doing
so you have severed yourself from it.

Now
in the same way, the man who thinks that Jesus Christ is an external
object to himself, to which he must bend the knee, he is not
participating in the mind of Christ. To participate in the mind of
Christ he must become it. He must have the same mind. But when he
does that he has no worship of an external objective mind, he is
that mind. And when all the beings have attained that level, then it
says, in those days, no man shall teach another of God, for all
shall know him. And what they shall know shall be themselves.

The
real self in the nucleus of the egg — the real intelligence —
is not other than this macrocosmic self. And it is only
identification — which means a super-stress placed on a finite
vehicle — that separates a man from salvation ... that is,
separates a man from his macrocosmic awareness. [41:58]

The Macrocosmic Sphere (Sophia)

Now
this Macrocosmic Self is a big egg of sentient power and this is the
source of the irritability of the little eggs that are made inside.
This Macrocosmic Egg, being power, squeezes itself, contracts onto
its centre, and then flies away to its perimeter. And it does this,
alternating. This is the same as the heart beat and the same as the
breathing. It breathes in, and it breathes out. And it does this
perpetually ... in-breathing and out-breathing. When it’s out
breathing, all the scientists get excited about the red shift
and say it’s expanding. When it’s in-breathing they all
get excited and say, very shortly we’ll all be compressed
into a nutshell and won’t be able to live any more. The
whole process is going on all the time, from the very, very nature of
the Infinite Absolute Power itself.

Now,
because it has this power, it retains within itself the formal
actualities of its own being. These are actualities for it. But for a
finite being within it, they are not actualities, they are
theoretical possibilities. But at their own level, at their own
frequency, they’re actualities now. And the motions traversing
the macrocosmic sphere backwards and forwards, produce by their
intersections all the forms of all the fauna and flora of the world.
So that every conceivable form there is, or could be, or has been, is
a permanent actuality within the macrocosmic sphere.

Now,
those forms are eternal. If a super-stress is placed upon one of
them, you might see an ostrich, and if the super-stress is placed on
another you might see a man. If the super-stress is persisted in,
we’d say there is now identification with a given form. But
that identification itself is of a coarser order than the subtle
frequencies running through the macrocosmic sphere. And just as in
our first diagram a heavy pain stimulus can overlay a relatively less
severe one, so in this way a great stress on the individual organism
can overlay the macrocosmic information. And when that super-stress
is put on and the information of a given vehicle is stepped up beyond
a certain level, then the person feels very clever and the measure of
his cleverness is in direct proportion with his ignorance of all the
other things he doesn’t know. [45:03]

In
coming to know very sharply by super-stress, it follows by law that
he has un-become to know the rest. To super-stress one element of
knowledge is to throw out of balance your wisdom. Knowledge and
wisdom are therefore opposed in this way, because knowledge
has to do with a given now. It is a ledge of now.
You know something but in the act of knowing it by super-stess at a
given moment, you have actually cut away the rest of your cosmic
knowledge. And the totality of all knowledge is called wisdom. So
that when your knowledge is total and macrocosmic, then you are wise.
Of course, there is not much to say then, except paradoxically and
dialectically. But if you have knowledge stressed very strongly, then
you can talk serially for a long time.

When
I am talking now, I am super-stressing particular elements from this
sphere deliberately to bring them into awareness, and at the same
time aiming to bring the intelligence to another level so that the
form within the consciousness can in fact integrate with more and
more subtle forms. And of course as we’ve said before this is
always done by a refinement of feeling and by the cutting down of
serial stresses and the becoming simultaneously aware of the field of
consciousness. If we become serially aware within this sphere, then
all that happens is: we put a super-stress, rub it out, put another,
one rub it out, put another one, rub it out, and so on. [47:00]

Serial
consciousness gives us elements of knowledge which continuously
change, but it cannot confer wisdom. Serial knowledge is opposed to
wisdom. But if we inhibit the serialising process and make ourself
sensitive in the field, we then become aware of the total field of
formal actuality which in the serial state is no actuality to us ...
but is merely a theoretical possibility.

Now,
here is the macrocosmic egg, the Logos and the Sophic sphere —
the ball that God plays with — and inside it have come to exist
various sub-spheres, the various divisions of organisms, and so on.
One of these sub-spheres we will say is the human sphere. And each
sphere is conditioned by the preceding motions of the sphere beyond
it. So that the macrocosmic sphere with its total formal actuality
conditions all subsequent spheres that are brought to be within it.

Now
this total macrocosmic, formal content is called the Law. It
is not many laws ... it is one law, the Law of Motion Within a
Sphere. The Law of Motion brought to be within a sphere, which is
palpitating or alternately contracting and expanding, and thereby
causing itself to rotate. The Great Law of Macrocosmos is a Unific
Law which, understood, can explain all subsequent laws that appear.

The Law of Unity

So
the first law we are under is the Law of Unity. This Law of Unity is
imposed on all subsequent levels. But every sub-sphere within it has
the Law of Macrocosmic Unity imposed upon it, the law of its own
being — which is another unifying and particularising element —
and also the Law of interrelations contingent with other beings.

Now,
there is the whole human race, and we’ll divide it into three
sections for fun: Shem, Ham and Japheth. And we’ll pretend that
we are a few Japheths and go in here. At each level there are laws
imposed upon us ... all based on the original law of unity. And when
one of these little beings divides itself and makes a little
derivative being called a baby, that baby is still subject to all the
law that is imposed on all the beings that have preceded it. And it
is still, because it exists, the same protoplasm as its parents, as
its ancestors, as the macrocosmic sphere and the Absolute Infinite
Spirit from which it derives. So we have, not in past time, but now,
directly through the nuclear centre of our own cells, access —
if we want to take it — to God ... that is, the free spirit. We
don’t need to go back in time, because Adam is with us now.
This was said by one mystic who said, although by one man all men
fell — Adam — the reason that all men fell is because
each man is his own Adam and repeats the same trick.

The
sin of the original Adam is this choosing between good and evil,
rejecting pain as evil and pursuing pleasure as good. This causes the
dichotomy, the original opposition when the first wall is set up, and
until a man is prepared to accept that pleasure is no good and pain
is no evil, and simply to say that both of them are specific kinds of
action, and to be prepared to indulge in both equally, then he cannot
regain his original unity. [51:25]

Hurt and the Resistance to Unpalatable Truth

So
here we see that when a baby is conceived, it is nothing new. It is
simply some protoplasm of the original human race, which is some
protoplasm of organic life on earth, which is some protoplasm of the
macrocosmic soul. And therefore we have immediately, and now, a
direct line through the nuclear intelligence of our protoplasm back
to the infinite spirit. And the question is, how to get at it?

The
obvious and simple answer: to get at it we must cut away the things
that stop us, because it is there all the time. It has never
not been there. This Infinite Intelligence has never not
been anywhere. And consequently to get at it, all we have to do
is remove the interfering motions of our own being.

Now
let’s have a look where most of them come from. There is a
being. It had a nuclear centre. It split. It put a wall, it put
another wall, and so on. The more walls it put inside itself, the
more possibility there was of conflict within the being. These are
the walls of Simeon and Levi killing the man to their own hurt. We
grow nerves across these walls to help us to integrate and convey
messages, and by means of electrical resistances we are able to
determine the path through which a given thing shall go. But if a
given cell has been badly hurt, it has the power to contract to avoid
being hurt again, and it has the power to refuse to let a message go
to it ... it will refuse to let a message pass through into another
cell. Now this is the ground of all resistance in the minds of men to
unpalatable truth. Somewhere they have been hurt. [53:42]

Now,
if we imagine a being with no other beings outside it, we can easily
see that although this being may divide itself, this being is never
going to hurt itself so much from itself that it is going to destroy
itself. There’s a limit to how much it will hurt itself. Like
small boys testing their muscles, lifting up bits of rock in the
garden, it will be prepared to hurt itself to a certain degree, but
it won’t hurt itself beyond that degree. And it is only beyond
that degree that trouble really begins. So that we have to introduce
the concept of contingent relation to account for the painful
stimulus that actually causes a shut down in consciousness ... a zone
that is going to refuse to let a stimulus go through it. For every
part of our cells where we feel a resistance to a truth given to us,
we can say immediately there is a pain hiding inside some cells. They
don’t like it and they are not going to accept this truth and
let it into themselves, and therefore they’re not letting it
through to some other cells which may need it.

A
little bit of meditation and reflection will teach us all that we
have such resistances in parts of our being. But if we allow those
resistances to continue to exist, we cannot regain our original unity
and we cannot function efficiently. So the method of regaining our
prior unity is to remove these resistances. Now we can’t remove
them other than by deliberate conscious facing of the very thing that
doesn’t want to be faced consciously.

If
we take the cell and we bring another cell into contact with it and
let this one beat very violently this one, then the cells inside here
contract and try to isolate the zone of that being so that the
painful stimulus will not spread. When they succeed they have created
of one moment a zone of unconsciousness and a zone of turbulence.
Because as soon as you isolate that zone the forces inside go round
and round and round. That means that every painful experience we’ve
ever had has produced a zone of unconsciousness inside us and at the
same time a zone of turbulence. That turbulence whizzes round and it
is because of the high velocity of that turbulence that it’s
extremely difficult to get a message through it into the rest of our
being.

As
soon as we come to a painful part of our experience and begin to look
at it carefully we will find turbulence. We will find funny voices
saying, mind your own business, don’t come in here, go away,
I don’t want to see you. This turbulence itself is like a
little sphere, and every sphere as we’ve seen before, contains
within itself all the formal possibilities of all spheres. So that an
unconscious zone of turbulence within us is a little subsidiary
entity — a sub-ent [sun-entity] inside us — and has its
own intelligence, but is highly turbulent. This means it is a devil.
A devil is defined as a force that is dividing the unity of the
being, a force of turbulence, and this turbulence is the cause of the
qualities called hellish. This turbulence is the cause of the
overheating. If you say something when somebody is off-guard, a
little un-flattering, and they blush, that is just a tiny bit of the
heat from the zone of turbulence where the energy flies around
rapidly. And then this rapid motion generates heat and this heat
causes the rising of the temperature of the being and the blushing,
and so on. Zones of turbulence are little hells and each little hell
is a little demon ... a little devil.

Casting out demons

When
it says of Christ he was casting out demons, or devils from people,
it meant to say that he was cutting straight through the thing that
they were trying to hide, and letting the energies come out. When
they do come out they sometimes make a lot of noise. The noise should
never upset us, because it is better out than in. When it’s in,
it is actually making inroads into the protoplasm, carving the
protoplasm up and laying the foundations of organic disease. When it
comes out it can’t do any harm. [58:54]

Hell and the Seven Deadlies

So
we see here, that wherever a pain has occurred in a being, there has
been a cellular reaction walling it in, creating a zone of
unconsciousness, which is a zone of turbulence, which is a zone of
thwarted and hurt will, which is a zone of the seven deadlies. As an
individual it is full of pride, it likes itself. As an individual it
is envious of the power of others, it is covetous ... when it sees
something it wants it. And when it can’t get it, it is angry.
And it would stuff itself and it would go to sleep, and it can in
fact perform all the seven deadlies in itself in its little hellish,
turbulent sphere. Boehme uses the term ‘turba’ for that
state into which it is very, very easy to enter when we allow
ourselves to become angry. Boehme says here that the devil’s
power reaches only as far as the anger in us. If we allow ourselves
to become angry, then by so much we are destroying protoplasm inside
ourselves. It can only exist at certain temperatures, like an egg is
only fertile if you don’t boil it.

Some
naughty old rabbis when they were told that they mustn’t
indulge their sexual appetites in certain ways, and to confine their
attentions in certain periods, replied by placing their testicles in
very hot water. This was an attempt to boil their eggs. Now they
actually succeeded in this. If anybody would like to boil his eggs
and willing to show how it can be done? [laughter] It can be
done and it is a kind of contraceptive device more efficient than
some other ways. But it was very greatly frowned upon.

It
illustrates the fact that if you become angry you become turbulent,
you become overheated. You can actually destroy your own tissue.
Anybody who’s seen a person — usually an insane person —
literally burning themselves away and losing weight rapidly hour by
hour can understand just how it is possible to destroy tissue by this
internal processes of turbulence, and how hell means precisely
this held in state of the being. When the baby comes into the world
it comes in with lots of little hells shadowed inside it from its
parents. Every quarrel its parents had is inside it. Luckily as we’ve
said before, in the absence of the external stimulus everything
lapses down as far as it can, nearly to a level of equilibrium ...
but not quite. But if a stimulus comes from outside similar to one
that annoyed grandmother a long time ago, that stimulus can
re-activate within us that shadow form, and suddenly there is
trouble.

Some of you may
have noticed a funny little cutting the other day, when a man was
allowed a divorce because his wife had a neurosis. It’s rather
a new departure. Within the meaning of the McNaughton Rules, she had
not come under the definition of the insane. She wasn’t insane
and therefore in a real sense she was deemed to be responsible for
her activities and therefore although she was a known neurotic, she
was still deemed as not insane ... responsible, and therefore a damn
nuisance to hubby. Now this had come upon her quite suddenly. She’d
suddenly got a cleanliness bug. She’d been alright, and then
suddenly everything in the house had to be clean. Everything had to
be neat and tidy, and husband found it was more convenient for him to
tidy the house than to let her do it. Also she took so long in going
to bed at night because she was insisting on coming clean, that hubby
never got any sleep, because he wasn’t allowed to go to sleep
until she was ready. And so it was deemed sufficient grounds for a
divorce. And this rather broke new ground. Neurosis is a possible
ground. But the point is that this woman was alright, and then quite
suddenly she started wanting to be very, very clean. Now something
outside had touched on some early thing inside — it might have
been the actual mnemic trace of a disease an ancestor had had —
and this, reactivating, says, go and wash yourself quickly.

Working with engrams

Now if the
person doesn’t know it, they must do it. Because there is a
very peculiar thing about an engram pattern inside us. When it is
made it usually has a verbal content, and the verbal content in an
engram is an imperative. It is a voice saying, do so-and-so,
hit out or don’t speak or kick him on the
shins or run away from home. Now, when such a zone is
reactivated, the owner of this vehicle hears a definite statement
inside his head, you must fly, now. Go. And it appears to him,
because it is inside him, that it’s his wish. And so he rushes
away. And really he is suffering from engram re-stimulation. All
psychiatry and psychotherapy that ignores that fact is climbing up a
blank wall.

No
person from the nuclear intelligence acts like an idiot. The
intelligence comes straight from the infinite, gives its orders into
the surrounding soma. And the orders are always intelligent. But from
the contingent relation come the painful stimuli and the creation of
zones of unconsciousness and turbulence, which are piled with verbal
imperative ... and they can talk nonsense. But to a person who is not
aware of that inner spiritual centre of freedom, a person who is
identified with engrammic zones, he is such a being. He
believes that he is a suffering being. He believes he must do as the
engram tells him.

To
break it in ourselves is hard work. There’s a school of thought
that thinks it’s possible and they tried valiantly to do it. It
took years and years and years even to break through the first wall.
With aid it is possible to break through it fairly quickly. This
mysterious word, the guru, means this fellow who helps you to
break through this primary block. The reason it’s difficult is
because you need a certain amount of free consciousness to remain
free, while you use some of it to enter the painful engram situation.
Because if you put all your consciousness in the engram situation,
you become turbulent with it and lose your feeling.

This
happens in certain types of mental disorder where a person is in a
highly re-stimulated condition and if you ask him in his then state
to penetrate it, he gets worse, not better. Now if you have the time
and he has, and he’s not physically too violent, you can keep
it there, keep him in it for several hours and it will then play
itself out. But usually the noise and the physical strain are so
great that generally the tendency is to come out of that situation
and be glad of the rest ... because it’s so noisy. To do it on
oneself, entering an engram which is very, very painful —
particularly pre-natals or ancestral ones — is very, very hard
work. To do it with somebody else outside to help you to control and
to continuously remind you of your free consciousness and your
initiative centre, is much easier.

Here
we have then, the return to the subject we started with: that the
child when it is born, it shows strong evidences that all its early
conditioning from birth is going to set the basic pattern of its
life, is already suffering from another kind of pattern imposed upon
it prenatally, and from its ancestors. And when we consider this:
that the child which is being conditioned is being conditioned by
another piece of protoplasm of the same order, which also is
suffering from re-stimulation of its ancestors, you can see that the
difficulty in the educational field is to find an educator
sufficiently free to be able to encourage freedom in the child and
not bondage. The biggest problem in the educational field is to find
educators who are actually able to educate instead of suffer from the
pains of their ancestors, engrammed in their own tissue.